I started a new comic tonight. I only worked on it for about an hour, but I felt a thrill at the imagined possibilities of this new project. I imagined pages that I might draw and directions that I might take.
I mentioned Virginia Woolf in my last monthly post, but I guess I have a little more to say. Let’s start with two quotes, both from Woolf herself but again as reported in the Harris biography:
“That behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this, that the whole world is a work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically. there is no God; we are the words, we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
“How does one make people talk about everything in the whole of life, so that one’s hair stand on end, in a drawing room?”
For me, these are two separate but related articulations of a very important question. I do think the first quote is a question, even if it’s phrased as a statement.
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Comics Dementia, Gilbert Hernandez
Virginia Woolf, Alexandra Harris
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov (reread) – Parts of this were nice, but I don’t like it as much now as I remember liking it on my last read.